reid@decwrl.dec.com (Brian Reid) (04/06/88)
I think that Watunga is trying to punish me for not making any April Fool's
postings. Yet another obscure (and relatively harmless) bug has shown up in
the monthly readership postings, which caused the listing for comp.sys.amiga
to be erroneously merged with the listing for comp.sys.amiga.tech
Here's what happened. In order to cope with various brain-damaged software
that some people insist on using, such as 2.9 news or old notesfiles,
my arbitron processing program has some heuristics in it to compensate for
newsgroup names that are truncated to 14 characters. For example, if it sees
a report saying that some site has 11 readers of a group named
comp.sys.zenit or soc.culture.ja, I will consult the table of real group
names and fill in "comp.sys.zenith" or "soc.culture.japan".
Specifically, what happens is this:
if reported-newsgroup-name has exactly 14 characters
and those 14 characters exactly match the first 14 characters of
a legal newsgroup name
then
substitute the longer name for the shorter name in the report.
The problem is that "comp.sys.amiga" is exactly 14 characters, and
"comp.sys.amiga.tech" is a group name whose first 14 characters exactly match.
So everyplace that I got a report for "comp.sys.amiga" the program
automatically substituted "comp.sys.amiga.tech".
I have changed the logic as follows:
if reported-newsgroup-name is not a known newsgroup
and if reported-newsgroup-name has exactly 14 characters
and those 14 characters exactly match the first 14 characters of
a legal newsgroup name
and the remaining characters (15 through n) of that longer legal
newsgroup name do not contain a '.' (period)
then
substitute the longer name for the shorter name in the report
It's not worth re-running and re-posting for this month, but this should all
work next month.
Brian